Low Polygon Modeling A Simple Tree / Blender Basics for Game Design

hey what's up everyone and welcome to the first video in the organic low polygon course in this video we're going to focus on the creation of a simple low polygon tree we'll touch base on a couple of tips and tricks to help us speed up this process and then to finish it up we will clean up our model by merging a few vertices and cutting back on faces especially in areas where later on baked lighting may have issues okay let's get started so the first thing we want to do is just press AAA select everything hit delete and make sure that our cursors in the center of the screen if it's not just shift to C to do so and we want to hit shift a we're gonna add a mesh and a cylinder go ahead and change these vertex count to 12 and we're gonna press 1 on our number pad then 5 and that will give us a front-facing orthographic view you're just gonna press GZ and we want this a little bit underneath our ground plane so that when we're placing these things in Unreal Engine that they do drop underneath the ground especially for slopes and stuff like that alright and now just control shift C and that's going to set our origin to the 3d cursor is what we want to do and bring it there and that lets us scale based on that alright so we're gonna set our trunk to an appropriate size and we will go press tab and control tab so that we can select faces and we're going to just press GZ bring that trunk up a little higher so it's appropriate we'll come down to select the space on the bottom scale it out a little like so come back up to the top here and we're going to press e to extrude and GX so we can start making our first branch and just again the X along that X I'm gonna press G Y here again the X I would say that's pretty good let's actually come back a little yeah I'm happy with that okay now while in edit mode we just make sure we're not selecting anything press Z so that we can see our wireframe and B select all these faces here shift D to duplicate it and just right-click to reset it and we're going to press P and separate this by selection now we can tab out to object mode and select only that object rotate along the Z just move so that we can do this better create a second branch here like so and press Z so I can see everything and shift D to create another one and rotate this one now you could get a little creative with this and make each branch very original I'm not going to do that for this video but of course you can I'm just gonna use this initial branch for demonstration purposes now at this point we're gonna start merging things together you could either do this by applying a boolean Union and setting it to right here setting it to our original cylinder but personally I prefer not to use this method because it does leave behind scraps that you have to clean up so this is where I recommend the sculpt plugin and its union function I'll have a link in the description to the sculpt plugin so that you can go to the github get that Python script and install it now assuming that you do have the sculpt plug-in we're going to continue on from there if you don't have it of course go get it and if you're not going to install it in your blender then you'll just do the same thing except you're going to have to apply a boolean to each one of these extra branches and associate it to that original trunk and then clean up the scraps that it leaves behind so what we want to do now making sure that these are all separate objects we're going to scale these lower to here so that they're not hanging out like these are so what we need to do is just select this one here tab into edit mode I'm gonna grab the edge and alt right click the entire edge here and scale that down and I'll do the same by tabbing out Dobb Jakob tabbing back in I'll right-click on this edge here scaling it down as well and I'm gonna do that one so it's even smaller than the other that way they're not colliding at all and we'll just shift right click all these and select Union now that merges them into a single object and it also cuts out the interior so that you don't have interior faces now sometimes this can not work properly and you will have interior faces if that happens one method is to just go to select and select all by trait interior faces if you had any then it would select those interior faces and you could delete them sometimes that might not work as well then you have to manually delete them but ours worked out well so what we're gonna do now is clean this up a little bit so on the next step when we decimate it that it is not going to have too many issues where we need to fix a bunch of things later on moving on we are gonna go into edit mode on our new only object in the scene by pressing tab and we're gonna ctrl tab select vertexes and we're gonna clean some of this up we're gonna just take C here we'll take this one in this one we're gonna go alt M which will allow us to merge vertex we're gonna say at last and do the same for this one and this one all right now we'll just bring all these together that Center and this one here at last all right I'll take hmm let's see we'll take this one Marge it there and we will take these two merge them together and then merge this here actually we'll just take this one there and we'll bring this one down here and so this is sometimes a bit of a process sometimes you'll find yourself you know controls being out of it totally normal you know you just the more you do it the more it becomes a streamlined thing and I even find myself with a lot of issues doing this sometimes too so expect that and we're going to just bring these here and we do want some of this action in here where we have this interior part we don't want that one because that's going to be ugly so we'll fix that in a second and we'll take this one up here yeah that's good we'll do this here and these two just press see so I can select them both and now technically this is not the way you want to do everything especially when you have faces like this because if we go to a mesh analysis and we go to distortion we'll see this does cause some issues for us right where we would have strange cuts and such but because of what we're doing here it's not really a big deal because we're going to be decimating this model anyway and that's going to be cutting down the faces and making clean faces for us and then we'll also be turning everything into tries later because of the nature of this design which is you know organic low polygon and so it's not really a big deal so we're not going to worry too much about that let's see what's going on here so bring these to Center and do this at the first bring all these together these two together that's looking pretty good there's a couple more here so when you're using C which you've seen me do a couple times see you let you use this like selection here where you can grab whatever you want and then you right click out of it just make sure that you know if you are using it you click on this and you come over here press C it's gonna select everything that you just selected and leave that behind so you got to make sure you press an a to unselect everything so we'll take these two Center like this to do that the first one this really isn't that bad right here because it's gonna then do it but it could cause some issues first later so we're gonna bring this down here we got a couple here if you ever have an issue where you can't select two but you know there's two vertices right there you know just press Z press C and scale that down so you can select and grab them like that alright and I think we're pretty much cleaned up here is that yep these are good if you ever confused about if there's a hidden one there you know you can just click on it and drag it around and then just ctrl Z back but I'm pretty happy with that I don't see we think we have any issues another thing we can do is select everything press W and remove doubles and if we see removed X number of vertices here then you know we had a couple that were overlapping each other but apparently we didn't so we're good and now we can move on to decimating this to see what it will look like so we'll come over here and select our modifiers tab and we're going to choose decimate and by dragging this ratio down we can bring down the polygon count on our model and get something a little more toward what we're looking for okay don't like that edge there we could always manually clean that up but we're gonna try not to mess around here it's not bad there's some symmetry going on but there's also some uniqueness to each branch which is nice and our trunk still looks pretty good so I'm happy with this yep I'm happy with it alright now we're gonna move on to the canopy of our truth now for a canopy we're just going to make sure that we're in object mode and we are and we're going to press shift a we're gonna add a eco sphere now you can just leave the subdivisions but I can spear it too so what we'll do with the psycho sphere is just expand it outward you could do something simple but I like to get a little unique with the shaping of it so what I'm going to do is just start over here on one side and now I want to smash down this top here so I'm just going to press s and Z smush it like so and G and Z to bring it down all right now shift D to duplicate right click out of that so it brings that duplication back to its origin and we're gonna press G and X to bring that out now we want some uniqueness in the shape here and of course will be decimating these as well so they're going to fuse together but to get that uniqueness we can change scaling a little bit we can scale along different axes but actually that you're not kind of nice and I like it so I'm just gonna stick with that for now shift D to duplicate this right click to send it back and G and Z to bring it up next to bring it over and I think that's going to turn out okay now what we're going to do is select all of these pieces to our canopy and we're going to use the sculpt tool union function again if you don't have the sculpt tool and you don't want to install it then you can use a modifier boolean and set that to Union by selecting the object you want a union the selected ones too again I prefer this method it's just a little faster so I highly recommend you get the sculpt tool and just use this union function here so we'll union that and we'll just have into it and Z to check to make sure we don't have interior faces and we don't which is good and we can't add back out we're going to add the decimate modifier and bring that ratio down and just watch the magic happen and now we have this nice organic looking tree canopy for our low poly tree not really anything I think I need to change it all looks pretty organic and pretty unique so I'm pretty happy with this tree so what I'm gonna do now is because I have the sculpt tool I can select both these objects and apply mods and that will apply both decimates for each of them if you don't have it again you can just come here come into your modifiers and just apply them individually but we'll select them all by mods and now we have the geometry of our tree that we're looking for now the next thing in the last thing we're going to do in this video is merge these two objects together and the reason this is important is because when you're baking shadows if you're not using dynamic shadows which you probably won't be in your game for these low-polygon trees because you know they're not moving they're not going to move it just wouldn't feel right if they did move you're probably going to use baked shadows and in a later video we will talk about how to set that up but right now we just want to make sure that we have everything in line so that when we do get there we don't have issues with that now if you're using dynamic shadows the shadows will be pretty nice around here regardless but if you're baking the shadows what you'll get is this weird shadow effect that happens here and for these low poly trees it just doesn't make sense so what we're going to do is we're going to merge these two together by Union and we just want to look at it real quick and make sure there's not anything funky one thing we can do is try to get these on flat faces as much as possible by rotating along the Zed and see you like that we can scale this up a little bit so now we have each one of those trunks going into a flat face that makes it easier for us when we are setting up our light map UV and the reason is is because we want to select everything that's on this triangle here for example and be able to just put that on our UV somewhere in our light map all right so that looks pretty good to me and what I'm going to do is just select both of these using my sculpt Union and I'm going to check to make sure I don't have any interior faces and I don't everything seems to be nice clean-cut alright guys that concludes the first video in the low-polygon organic design in the next video we'll talk about setting up UV maps so that we can texture this if you appreciate the content you can help support this channel on patreon.com slash toxicity gamedev make sure you hit that like button describe if you want to see more there's a lot to come peace

Channel: Toxicity Game Dev

Views: 80,836

Keywords: gaming, game design, ue4, blender, unreal engine, unreal engine 4, blender modeling, 3d modeling, low polygon, low polygon modeling, learn to model, learn 3d, learn ue4, learn to make games, game dev, game development, 3d, blender tricks, blender tips, game asset design, game objects, modeling, low poly, blender basics, game, tutorial, design, indie game dev, idie, developer, howto, basics, simple, low, poly, blender howto, beginner, learning, skillset

Id: MhQ_3CgaKEI

Length: 16min 33sec (993 seconds)

Published: Sat Oct 14 2017